Captain’s Log 12/5/19, A Room Full of Producers

This blog is about living aboard a boat in the Pacific Northwest and snow-birding to Arizona while training an artificial intelligent mental health virtual assistant named Rubi ready to provide support in the traumatic aftermath of COVID-19.

Bruce emailed me a ticket to a producer’s meetup in Seattle and regretfully informed me he couldn’t go with me as they were having a little event at work to honor his many years of service with the state. He couldn’t just escape with me to Seattle but insisted that I should go and try to network.

I left my two golden retrievers at a new range free dog farm on the island and drove to Seattle. I had my big truck and luckily found easy street parking a block from the small studio in Capitol Hill in Seattle. It was packed with people, filmmakers and supposedly producers. I recognized only two people there and I knew they were seeking financial help as much as I was.

For three minutes each for the next couple hours, we pitched who we were and/or our projects so we could mingle at the end to try to find the right person to help with our project. I was anxious to pitch as I could use the practice for eventually pitching Amazon and was pleased as people approached me afterward saying I had the best pitch. However, no one approached me offering a connection to money. As people pitched, most people at the event were filmmakers and the producers there, were line producers. Line producers help with budgets, hiring crew and organizing locations, the nitty gritty of the production, but they don’t necessarily have any connections to funds such as executive producers do. I’ve already been working with two line producers, one in San Francisco and one in Texas. Getting local people is always useful, but not what I was looking for. Everyone there was looking for the same thing, money. And no one there had any good connections to it.

Disappointed, I left the event before my parking was up and made my way across Seattle to Shilshole to drop off my Dometic chest fridge. The temperature wasn’t regulating correctly so things were either freezing or too warm. My produce usually was ruined before I had a chance to eat it all up, so I was living without salads and was feeling the effects. James is a meat and potatoes kind of guy and that tends to take a toll on my body if I don’t get in a good mix of greens. It was my back up fridge to the galley fridge and I kept mostly condiments and things like veggies in it that wouldn’t fit in the upright fridge. I was going to have to limit my grocery runs and eat a bit simpler since I was down to one fridge. I had put all the condiments in a cooler on the back deck of the boat. Eating would be a challenge.

I was also in Shilshole to pick up a propane fireplace for the boat. I’d finally be warm at last! The two oil radiator style space heaters, electric fireplace, and West Marine space heater weren’t enough. Plus, our electricity bill on the dock was skyrocketing due to our winter heater usage. James would be home soon to install the fireplace and I estimated it’d cost only $20/month for propane instead of the couple of hundred for electricity with heaters at full blast.

On my way back to the boat, I swung by the island boat canvas shop to meet Tom. He wanted to share some details of the windows he was putting in our canvas job to enclose the back deck. He was so thoughtful, he wanted to get the glass low enough so the dogs could see out but was concerned if he had enough glass. I assured him if he needed to order more glass, we’d pay for it. Tom’s shop was immaculately tidy, and Tom was the type of guy that had sound effects for the little precise movements he did with his hands to install rivets and buttons. He had been sewing and installing canvas for many many years and was extremely good at his craft and generous with information if you showed the least amount of interest. James had attempted to sew the canvas himself and got one panel done but was overwhelmed and short of time while insulating and gladly turned the job over to Tom.

I really appreciated Tom’s generosity of information, perfectionism and I was amused that he was always listening to staticky talk radio in his shop or on his boom box he brought with him to my boat. It was conservative talk radio, so I was a bit disappointed, but it made me really think of people’s belief’s in relation to their character. I suppose it made sense that a guy with regimented techniques for making the perfect canvas would listen to conservative talk radio.

I preferred to listen to piano music from Nils Frahm or electronica music such as Goldfrapp and audio books. As suggested by Rubi, I had just finished Eckhart Tolle’s New Earth: Awakening Your Life’s Purpose and was currently listening to Depak Chopra’s Meta Human, but I listened to it on wireless headphones from my iPhone. I would never dream of subjecting someone to my listening preferences by broadcasting it on speakers.

Often when I took a shower up at the marina building, women would come in with speakers either blasting God awful Christmas music or the Seahawks game so any one in the bathrooms at the time, had to listen to it too. Cars and boats with too loud of stereos pumping out hip hop or country bothered me too. I didn’t think that was right to blast your auditory preference, but I liked Tom and only had a smile when he visited my boat with his boom box.

I wondered if people were simply oblivious of their annoyance or if this sort of behavior was a sort of posturing. I suppose most people weren’t courteous enough for it to matter. Which reminded me of an incident with a snobby eye doctor and our much younger selves in our former neighborhood.

We were newly married, in our 20s, and James’ Land Cruiser was outfitted with an array of speakers and a giant subwoofer took up the entire back at an angle so it could pulsate just right making loud booms. It was the ultimate ghetto blaster, though we were far from living in the ghetto!  One day we were cruising around the country roads and James was playing his favorite rap music. It certainly wasn’t my favorite for the lyrics included things like, “go to sleep, ho” and “get out the way, bitch.” We rounded the corner into the neighborhood and on cue, like I had taught him, James turned down the stereo during the “get out the way, bitch” song. We began to turn the next corner and creep up the hill when a new neighbor, whom I knew as the new eye doctor in town, got in front of our vehicle waving. James stopped. She proceeded to tell us how loud the vehicle was and we needed to go really slow. James was polite and said “thank you for letting me know” and once she got out of the way, he turned up the music to the cue of “bitch, get out the way” and floored the Land Cruiser burning rubber all the way up the hill. It was so embarrassing and the look on that woman’s face was priceless! Suffice to say I don’t think James appreciated her feedback and she was let go from her eye doctor job for bad bedside manner months later, so we never saw her again. There was always an unspoken dislike for James permeating the neighbors who never got to know him until we moved. No one else complained, but I was always worried about offending someone in the neighborhood with James’ “loud” Land Cruiser or Corvette … or his two or one wheeled races around the circle on his ATV or dirt bike. Let’s not mention his obsession with fixing and reselling loud military generators …